barralopolis

Picture taken at a quaint Victorian tea place my women colleagues go for holiday tea every December. Love the tea, but not the cup- I drink from large ceramic mugs!

In a previous post I recounted how I came across Tim Ferriss’ 4-hour approaches, and how it influenced the design of my lectures. For the record, I have not read any of Tim’s books 100%, and I do not think that is his goal anyway. I got “The 4-hour chef” from the library and managed to try out 2 recipes (which worked fine), learned a way to chop onions without chopping my fingers, and again shook my head at his lambasting statements about being able to learn anything in a very short time.

On the other hand, as I mentioned before, the whole issue of accelerated learning is important for me. My university’s approach and niche is accelerated learning, with courses 4 and 8 weeks long. For somebody in the semester system, that sounds crazy. However, our students take only one class at a time, which means all their attention is focused on that class.

And then it comes, of course, the issue of “simpler is harder, less is more” mantra, which has been my leading light for the past years. In 2012 I attended at ASCB 2012 an education symposium, where an integrated science curriculum at Princeton was presented. I order to make it work, the course was streamlined- students spent a lot of time on mathematics and physics principles essential for quantitative analysis, and learned even some coding early on. What was taken out the curriculum? Descriptions of the classic molecular biology experiments of the 1950s. I remember nodding. Why do we teach those historical milestones? Because we were taught that way. Of course they were relevant and elegant, and they teach students about the scientific process, but would not be more relevant to let students figure out how science works while actually doing it?

Currently I am in a phase of thinking a lot about teaching and learning. In “educationese,” I am in a metacognitive phase (chuckle). Reasons are manyfold: such as embarking with a colleague on an ambitious flipped classroom project for a majors biology class, or the need to write a number of reflection essays for different proposals. And as tighten my mental reins and try to be more focused and more productive (while not losing completely the ability to spot attractive unexpected possibilities), I am also more open to suggestions of how to do it.

This posting was inspired by a recent posting by Tim about productivity tricks. I was pleased to see some approaches I already use, and even more about the change from coffee to tea! Yes, me. As long as I remember I have been an inveterate coffee drinker of multiple cups just to get started in the morning. Recently and following doctor’s orders I cut down to one cup in the morning, after which I switch to tea. To make the transition more palatable I decided to go for finer loose-leaf tea, and in the past weeks I have assembled a nice collection (still growing) . What is mind-boggling for me how easy the transition has been, and how much clearer my mind is. In fact, if by habit I pour myself a second cup of coffee it does not feel good at all.

Bottom line of this slightly rambling post? Inspiration can come from many sources, some quite unorthodox. Tools can be adapted from other contexts very effectively. And sometimes small changes (like switching to tea) may have large effects.